Tuesday, March 06, 2012

The LG Twins in the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) on Tuesday released their two pitchers facing match-fixing allegations and asked the league to hand out lifetime bans if the players are criminally punished.

The Seoul-based Twins announced that pitchers Kim Seong-hyun and Park Hyun-jun are no longer on the team. They are being investigated for allegedly taking kickbacks from a gambling broker last season to issue first-inning walks on purpose.

Kim was recently taken into custody, while Park has been questioned by prosecutors in Daegu, some 300 kilometers southeast of Seoul, without physical detention.

The Twins’ decision comes one day after the KBO suspended the two players indefinitely. The club also said it will ask the league to ban Kim and Park for life if they receive criminal penalties.

“We offer our sincere apologies to our fans for causing such major disappointment and trouble,” the Twins said in a statement.

“We have made this decision before any judicial decision, but we believe players who’ve betrayed fans’ trust should no longer take the ground.”

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The alleged offense reminds me of the "spot fixing" cases that are currently plaguing cricket.

Issuing a first inning walk is the kind of thing that a crooked bookie could sell to a player as being highly unlikely to have any impact on the result, and therefore qualifying as "not really throwing a game" (the cricket cases have focused on the rough equivalent of wild pitches with no men on base).

If you can find enough people who are stupid enough to bet on such a thing (and they are reportedly legion in Asia), it's a genuinely difficult problem to address.